During the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt frequently entertained his friend and fellow New Yorker Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City, at the White House. La Guardia would tell the president a “sad story” about some project he wanted funded and Roosevelt would buckle: “Tears run down my cheeks and the first thing I know he has wangled another $50 million.” La Guardia was manipulative and self-serving, but he also helped guide a policy that proved critical to beating the Depression. Roosevelt’s economic agenda succeeded in large part as an urban agenda. Over time, mayors became darlings of the White House and their lobbying arm, the Conference of Mayors, dedicated itself to promoting New Deal endeavors in exchange for federal largesse.

Today’s mayors enjoy the same access to President Obama as their predecessors did to FDR, but so far they’re seeing different results: deteriorating urban conditions and a stimulus package adapted to the needs of state governors. Interviews with eleven mayors from across the country reveal that big-city chiefs are waiting anxiously to see whether the first big-city president in decades will treat cities as central to his agenda.

Last summer, when Obama was still on the campaign trail, he seemed eager to listen. At a June 2008 speech to the Conference of Mayors, he pledged to create the first urban policy office in the White House. The mayors of Minneapolis, Denver, and Dallas all consulted with Obama’s team as early as October 2008, reminding the candidate that cities provide the vast majority of American jobs and produce the bulk of its GDP.

These arguments won mayors a candid and bipartisan relationship with the White House. Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, who heads the Republican Mayors and Local Officials coalition, regularly chats with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Vice President Joe Biden, and other top administration officials. “I don’t think they would have spent their time talking to me if they didn’t really care what I thought,” he says. Another Republican mayor called certain energy grant applications “crap,” a comment he still marvels at making to the country’s second-in-command.

In the midst of this promising dialogue, however, the economic crisis has taken a firm hold. A September survey of city budget officers warned that “the nation’s cities will most likely still be realizing the effects of the current downturn in 2010, 2011, and beyond.” Unemployment rates are above 10 percent in almost a third of metro areas—as high as 16 percent in cities like Detroit and Flint—and service cuts and layoffs are likely. Reacting to these conditions, voters earlier this month sacked at least one incumbent mayor, Seattle’s Greg Nickels, and gave an unexpected scare to another, New York City’s Michael Bloomberg.

Now mayors are pointing out that the stimulus package was supposed to help cities avoid this nightmare scenario. During the bill’s conception, mayors stressed that a state-focused stimulus would bring slow, inefficient results, and that more jobs could be created if money were funneled directly to urban areas. In a report issued last winter, the U.S. Conference of Mayors listed more than 15,000 “ready-to-go” projects that could provide 1.2 million new jobs in just two years.

So what happened, exactly? “I think we were listened to,” says Stamford, Connecticut, Mayor Dannel Malloy, who will run for governor of his state as a Democrat in 2010. “I just think we were then ignored. And I don’t think we were necessarily ignored by the president. I think we were ignored by the Congress.” Vice President Biden, the stimulus sheriff, has echoed this explanation. In a September speech on the stimulus, he lamented that “Congress, in its wisdom, decided that the governors should have a bigger input.”

But the White House can’t blame this shift entirely on Capitol Hill. Biden, Emanuel, and other administration officials spent late nights and much political capital shaping the finer details of the stimulus package in ways that thrilled states but disappointed cities. As Brookings scholar Thomas Mann has observed, “Obama’s hands were all over this bill from start to finish. … The nitty-gritty legislative work identifying where and how these decisions could be implemented … was done in Congress with the direct participation of key Obama administration staff.”

Representative Chaka Fattah, chair of the urban caucus in the House of Representatives, acknowledges that Congress privileged states over urban areas when drafting the stimulus bill. “If you had nine dollars missing in social service funds to a city, there would be a call for a grand jury investigation,” he told me recently, contrasting this with the billions of dollars misplaced and largely forgotten in Iraq. “There was a great deal of concern about how to [fund] things that were needed and not end up with headlines that were going to be problematic at the end of the day.”

Though Fattah can list a slew of funding streams in the stimulus package that he says will eventually benefit urban areas, mayors remain skeptical. Trenton Mayor Douglas Palmer jokes that some mayors have “seen money go to building roads where there are more deer than people.” Mayor Cornett is blunter. In his us-versus-them view, “It was either going to be a governors’ stimulus package or a mayors’ stimulus package, and this is a governors’ stimulus package.”

The evidence seems to be on the mayors’ side. In July, TheNew York Times analyzed the distribution of stimulus money, particularly the $26.6 billion that had been allocated for roads and transportation projects. The federal government left the details up to states, which, the Times noted, “have a long history of giving short shrift to major metropolitan areas.” After looking at approved transportation projects in all 50 states, the authors concluded, “It is clear that the stimulus program will continue that pattern of spending disproportionately on rural areas.” North Carolina state stimulus overseer Dempsey Benton agrees that the federal-state allocation formula “has been a source of frustration,” favoring country roads over urban freeways.

Mayors are hopeful that Obama will eventually turn his attention back to federal urban policy. The president has already made good on his promise to create a White House urban affairs office, a historically significant step for cities. Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter treated urban areas as warrens of poverty and racial conflict that would implode without sufficient attention. Richard Nixon took the opposite approach, espousing a theory of “benign neglect” toward urban problems that set the tone for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Even Bill Clinton, widely viewed as a champion of cities, struggled to come up with a workable plan for metropolitan areas. Just a few weeks after the administration issued a national urban policy report, Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros expressed concern in a memo to the president. “We do not have enough to stand on,” Cisneros wrote frankly, adding, “We can be caught flatfooted by the violent outbreaks which will stem from the anger of the cities.”

Today’s mayors are urging the White House to embrace cities not as problems needing to be solved but as catalysts of long-term economic well-being. “America needs a jobs bill,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told me recently. “There are ways to leverage what cities are doing through federal partnerships that won’t even cost a lot of money up front. We need to be thinking of those creative partnerships.”

So far, the most notable activity of the urban affairs office has been a “listening tour.” The director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs, former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión, has led the tour into three cities over the last five months, meeting with local innovators in each location. “Our mission in developing a new urban policy,” he told me in a statement, “is to make our cities and metropolitan areas more economically competitive and environmentally sustainable, and the critical investments being made through the Recovery Act are helping us achieve those goals.” But as stimulus funds continue to pass their cities by, mayors are looking for more than good listeners. “Listening is not an action. Listening is passive,” says Malloy, the mayor of Stamford. “Action requires definitive steps.” For that, America’s mayors say they are still waiting.

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

“All the world has failed us,” a resident of the Syrian city of Aleppo told the BBC this week, via a WhatsApp audio message. “The city is dying. Rapidly by bombardment, and slowly by hunger and fear of the advance of the Assad regime.”

In recent weeks, the Syrian military, backed by Russian air power and Iran-affiliated militias, has swiftly retaken most of eastern Aleppo, the last major urban stronghold of rebel forces in Syria. Tens of thousands of besieged civilians are struggling to survive and escape the fighting, amid talk of a rebel retreat. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, the city of the Silk Road and the Great Mosque, of muwashshah and kibbeh with quince, of the White Helmets and Omran Daqneesh, is poised to fall to Bashar al-Assad and his benefactors in Moscow and Tehran, after a savage four-year stalemate. Syria’s president, who has overseen a war that has left hundreds of thousands of his compatriots dead, will inherit a city robbed of its human potential and reduced to rubble.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves. The reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.

It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats.

They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight.

A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.